The Skinnery

I never buy a skin in more than one tone. I narrow my choice down to my fave light tone and my fave dark tone and then choose one winner. But when I tried Ming, new from Umazuma Metaluna for The Skinnery, I decided it was time to pretend I am Marie Antoinette and can eat lots of cake without dieting or worrying about the sheep, at least while Siouxsie and the Banshees are playing at the ball. Compared to recent releases, these faces are soft and velvety. The area above the cheekbone is especially beautiful. It looks like vulnerable flesh, not like foundation.

Like this:

I am a dyed-in-the-egg fan of easter. (As a secular, chick-hugging, basket-filling rite of spring.) But Portia has had one too many hollow chocolate treats. Get too close to her this Sunday and she’ll give you an earful about the eggsploitation of hens. Portia’s lavender mesh corset is from Etchaflesh, the store where corsets go to be born. Select styles offer regular sizes and busty versions in one pack. There are no appliers involved in the busty versions. Each size of the bübs-friendly version boasts the same DD-size cups. As large as the cups look, they could not accommodate Ms. Capelo’s Lolas until I’d downsized them from watermelons to smaller watermelons. I suspect some of you are too young to remember Homey D. Clown.

Like this:

Bunneh Brickworks Kawashima is an SL blogger and one of my sweetest Flickr friends, but she is also a bad influence. In a good way. This week, Bunneh is shooting a series of photos featuring public nudity. I had to see if I could do what she does. (These two pics will have to last a whole week, so look at them slowly. Or frequently.) I admit that while shooting these pics I was afraid that I would be caught and banned from my fave sim. So I appreciate the risky thrill of public nudity. At the very same time that I enjoyed doing something wrong, however, I also felt the rightness of the beauty of the naked human body, of the SL creators’ imaginative ways of enhancing that beauty, and of my own effort to create an erotic image rather than just a nude shot. I had to shoot many vanilla pics and many upper-body images before I was absorbed—or committed—enough to find a sexier pose and show Portia’s pudendum. If we are easily shocked by erotic imagery, it is because we are too distanced from the naked body rather than too close. Our determination to keep the body, and sex, private is a symptom of our inability to embrace the body in its erotic aspects. (Don’t get me started on body-as-bourgeois-private-property. That way lies Marx.) Having said this, I did decide to censor the pic with some soap bubbles. If you want to see the uncensored version, you will need a Flickr account with preferences set to see restricted images. In addition to Bunneh’s example, I was inspired by Umazuma Metaluna’s new Lolas Tango appliers for The Skinnery. These are the sexiest nips on the grid, their appeal to the fingers as strong as their appeal to the eye. Ms. Metaluna has done appliers for old skins as well as new, so customers aren’t forced to abandon the old skins as obsolete. She is putting her customer first. This I like.